Cranky

I have been cranky for a month now. Even as I sit here writing this I feel the crankiness, the resistance to write settling in. I have been doing all the things I know to try an alleviate the crankiness, yet, this heaviness of frustration and fatigue simply does not want to lift.

I have started to wonder if it is the pressure put on the holidays? We live in a wounded world and the pain we are dealing with has felt so much sharper in the past few years. Since the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic, I have experienced the holiday season has as a sort of bandaid for our pain. The Advent and Christmas seasons remind us that there is nourishing hope for here and now and to come. This hope is gritty and has learned to be flexible, otherwise it would break. It is a hope that does not ignore or turn from the realness of suffering—rather a hope that meets us right smack dab in the middle of our suffering.

However, the holiday season that has served as our bandaid has abandoned this type of hope to instead sell a sugary sweet, picture perfect, jam packed with stuff holiday season; one that often ignores the reality of suffering and turns a blind eye towards those who may find that this season is not the most wonderful time of year.

Perhaps my crankiness is due, in part, to the expectation that I am going to feel happy 100% of the time during the season. But for me, it has become a time that feels rushed, forced, emotionally taxing, and exhausting because instead of something genuine, real, and nourishing I am being fed a holiday that is too often wiped clean of the holy.

The holy that marks this time apart as sacred. The holy created by a loving God that does not ignore pain, grief, and suffering but rather finds us in it, sits down, and says gently “I know it is not okay, but I am here, you are not alone, and even if you can’t see it or feel it now I want you to know I am at work and somehow all things will come together.” The holy hope that stretches and encompasses our pain but also our joy. Encouraging us to feel it simultaneously and to be gentle with ourselves as we lean into the paradoxes life presents.

I am cranky and I am not sure if this feeling will go away before Christmas. But I know that Advent makes space for this feeling, makes space for me even when I am not at my holiday happy best. Advent reminds me that it is okay to feel cranky, angry, frustrated, hurt, sad, and grieved at the ways the world and all of creation is so wounded. Advent holds space for my crankiness and reminds me that even though all is not calm and bright—I can cling to the hope I have in Jesus.

So, as I wait for the coming of Christ again and for all things to be reconciled together I honor my emotions. I honor myself by experiencing the crankiness, the grief, the frustration, the sadness and being a little more gentle, kind, compassionate and patient with myself and others. Because I have hope, that someday in someway all things will truly come together for good (Romans 8:28). For now, I will celebrate the centimeters, I will allow myself to find the joys no matter their size and I will open my heart to see where the Kingdom of God is crashing in here and now as I wait for it to fully come.